Thinking through solidarity organizing, with an eye to how we can better live the change, as well as how we often slip in to colonial patterns when working together across distance and difference. Written from the perspective of a long time US and now Canada based international solidarity activist turned political geographer.

Oct 27, 2012

I am not Troy Davis,and I am NOT Malala. The "I am 'x person who is oppressed'" meme has been growing fast, but seems to have reached a high pitch with the "I am Malala" campaign being promoted by no less than the
The Office of the UN Special Envoy for Global Education.

OF
COURSE I am horrified by the attack Malala faced, and of course, I
totally support education for all, and the work of the special envoy. I
just don't get why we have to pretend to BE Malala to STAND with
Malala, and to support the campaign for education for all. I have so
many more privileges, that I am clearly NOT Malala, and it seems
appriopriative to say so. Maybe the intent is to be a version of the
labor solidarity slogan, 'an injury to one is an injury to all', which
of course I agree with, but it seems to deny and elide the huge gulfs of
difference between me and Malala. The video on the I am Malala website
(below) does not in any way try to build solidarity by showing HOW I
might be like Malala, or how an attack on Malala is also an injury
against me.

Oct 17, 2012

I've
been following the conflict in Mindanao more closely in the last few
years because there are international accompaniers there with the Nonviolent Peaceforce.
That team is particularly interesting because they have played an
official role in the peace process in a way that accompaniers never have
before.

Here is the announcement the Peaceforce posted explaining the peace agreement and their role:

Philippines Peace Agreement – Why This One is Different*

(*and why this is a truly historic moment for all of us at Nonviolent Peaceforce)

Peace
Agreements are a dime a dozen these days. With an average of 25 wars
going on around the world at any given time, there are peace agreements
about to be signed almost every other week. No wonder the world ceases
to take much interest anymore! Another Peace Agreement is signed in the
Philippines yesterday – yawn.

Over half of the world’s peace
agreements are broken within a few years anyway, that’s the official
record. Remember that historic peace pact between the Israelis and the
Palestinians – see how long that one lasted! And you may not even have
noticed that just a few years before the Sri Lankan military destroyed
the last remains of the Tamil Tigers on the battlefield, the two parties
had also signed a comprehensive peace agreement, brokered by the
Norwegians.

Sadly, this is the case for so many of the peace
agreements that make it onto paper. And some don’t even get that far –
the last peace agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro
guerrillas was quashed by a Supreme Court decision in 2008 just moments
before the two parties were about to sign the document.
So now we have a new peace agreement in the Philippines. Why should
we be interested and why should we expect this one to last or to be any
different from all the others? Well, as it happens, this one is
different, and may just foreshadow a whole new era in peace agreements,
not just for the Philippines, but for the rest of the world.

When
the last peace agreement failed and the ceasefire broke down on the
southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines in 2008, fighting broke
out across the island, there were some particularly nasty massacres and
over 600,000 people were displaced from their homes. But there was one
new element in the equation that had not been there before: the presence
of international unarmed civil society observers from a little-known
group called the Nonviolent Peaceforce.

These Nonviolent
Peaceforce observers had been quietly working away on the island,
building relationships with both sides of the conflict, establishing
their credentials as a neutral, independent, impartial actor willing to
help both parties to find solutions to practical problems they faced on
the ground – like how to avoid unnecessary bloodshed without appearing
to be weak or to be seen to be backing down; how to ensure safe passage
for civilians caught in the crossfire without losing ground militarily;
how to maintain contact with the ‘enemy’ and avoid misunderstandings
while at the same waging a war against them; how to put out feelers for a
ceasefire without appearing to give in…

Nonviolent Peaceforce
helped both sides of this war to be more civilised and more respectful
of civilians and as a result, when a ceasefire was finally agreed, both
sides asked Nonviolent Peaceforce to play an official role in the
ceasefire mechanism that would hold both sides to their commitments and
obligations under the ceasefire. It is not that unusual for two sides to
appoint an intermediary to monitor a ceasefire. Often the UN
plays that role, other times another country or set of countries will
be invited to do it. But never before in the history of war has a
non-governmental organisation made up of unarmed civilians from civil
society been asked to play a role quite like this. This was – and is –
historic, and is why the peace agreement just signed in the Philippines
is also historic.

There have been many other innovations
associated with this particular peace agreement, and they all deserve
attention because this is a new way of making peace in the 21st century.
As well as using a non-governmental organisation to help monitor the
ceasefire on the ground, the parties to this conflict also agreed to
have non-governmental organisations supporting the negotiations in Kuala
Lumpur, as part of the ‘International Contact Group’1. This is
unprecedented for a peace process like this. And on the ground, local
organisations were also given official status in support of the
ceasefire monitoring and protection of civilians2. Other countries have
of course played an important role, but the really significant
innovation has been having unarmed, international civilian
‘peacekeepers’ on the ground monitoring a ceasefire. Why?

Violence
begets violence – we all know that. We may not always think of it or
want to accept it, but every child who has ever scrapped on the
playground, every parent who has ever dealt with an unruly teenager,
every teacher, every social worker, every police officer has seen the
effects of using force or violence on someone else. For every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s basic physics! In the
field of human affairs, the reaction may not always be equal or opposite
(often the reaction is much worse than the action, as in the case of
terrorist atrocities committed to avenge some petty grievance), but it
is as surely a law of life as it is a law of physics that if you use
violence against someone or some group of people, you will sooner or
later get violence thrown back at you. It is a lesson not just from
science but also from art, as portrayed so consistently in Shakespeare’s
plays, for instance…

So when peace agreements and ceasefires are managed or monitored by soldiers, UN
or otherwise, who come complete with guns and tanks and helicopters,
what is the message that sends out to the combatants and to the
civilians who are most affected? Surely the deployment of soldiers, even
for ‘peace’, simply reinforces the age-old assumption that military
might, violence and force is what solves problems, whether the problem
is war or the problem is peace.

No wonder so many peace
agreements don’t last! No wonder so many ceasefires break down! How can
we even begin to challenge the war mentality and change the way people
try to handle their problems when we simply send in more military
personnel to deal with a problem caused by two militaries fighting each
other? Nonviolent Peaceforce throws a new dimension into this mix which
totally confounds this way of thinking and turns it on its head.
Actually, says NP, you are safer in a warzone as a civilian than you are
as a soldier. Actually, you are more able to protect innocent civilians
as a civilian than you are as a military officer. Actually, you are
more likely to help reduce violence – to break the cycle of violence –
by intervening as an unarmed civilian than by intervening with military
force.

This is ground-breaking stuff, and it has been going on
largely unnoticed but with huge success in the Philippines for these
past two years. And it is what has made possible a peace agreement which
has the real possibility of standing the test of time and giving the
people of this war-torn island what they most want and deserve – a true
and lasting peace.

And the reason it is so critical to the peace
agreement which has just been signed is that peace at the negotiating
table is only ever possible when there is real peace on the ground. Most
ceasefires are broken the day they are agreed, and they continue to be
broken every day because both sides are continually testing the other,
reigning in their forces only enough to get the best deal they can at
the negotiating table and if they don’t get it, are ready to go back to
fighting until they do. More traditional ceasefire monitors know all
this and they know that their job is merely to keep the belligerents at
bay long enough to give the negotiations a fighting chance – never to
actually address the problems and flashpoints and incidents and
violations that are going on by both sides. That is not how the game has
been played – until now.

Nonviolent Peaceforce has not just been ‘monitoring’ the
ceasefire in Mindanao. NP teams have been out there every day actually
‘peacekeeping’ in the true sense of that word: addressing concrete
problems on the ground, de-escalating tensions, getting both sides to
back off, preventing displacement and disruption of normal life, helping
people get used to real peace and encouraging them to expect it! This
is the new dynamic at play in this new peace agreement. The people of
Mindanao have already had two years of peace and they will not accept
anything less at this point. They – the ordinary civilians, the people
who bear the brunt of war when it happens – demand peace, and the
belligerents now have to give it to them.

And what about the
belligerents? Maybe they have also been somewhat affected by the
‘civilising’ presence of these unarmed civilian peacekeepers. They have
been treated throughout this conflict with dignity and respect by the
Nonviolent Peaceforce. They have been helped to see that is in their own
interest to treat the civilians caught up in this conflict also with
dignity and respect. And they have been helped to do the right thing
when it comes to respecting the ceasefire and the norms of international
humanitarian law and the accepted laws of war.

Nonviolent
Peaceforce has not turned soldiers into pacifists, and has no ambition
to do so, but it has helped to make sure that no soldier who believes he
or she is fighting for a cause, whether it’s the defence of one’s
country or the right to self-determination, forgets that he or she is
also responsible for how that fight is fought and how, in particular,
non-combatant civilians - especially women and children – are treated.
If they are now more likely to be treated with dignity and respect and
their rights and lives protected from the abuses and violations of war,
then this really is a very important peace agreement and a turning point
in the history of war.

For full text of speeches by the President of the Republic of the
Philippines and Chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on the
occasion of signing the peace agreement on 15th October 2012:

"Fend Off Trolls, Bots and Jerks With ‘Empathy’ Test

A human rights group is introducing a new take on CAPTCHAs, those little boxes that make you type in a word to prove you are human before you can comment or register for a site. Their version doesn’t just present a scrambled word to be deciphered, but instead forces a person to choose the right word to unscramble based on the proper emotional response to a human rights violation.

Civil Rights Defenders, the Swedish-based group that developed the tool, hopes the Civil Rights Captcha will help sites block spiders and bots, while letting humans in — and hopefully educating the humans at the same time.

One hopes that being required to choose “Terrible” rather than “Fascinated” when asked how you feel about gay people being beaten will keep out the trolls — but that’s probably asking too much.

But perhaps forcing a troll to repeatedly choose an empathetic response will, over time, soothe the ravages of comment sections around the net. Okay, that might also be asking too much, but at the very least spreading information about human rights abuses certainly can’t hurt, even if the jerks of the internet (see, for example, YouTube comments) remain beyond help."

Well it's a simplistic definition of empathy, and I doubt that it will build solidarity, but I guess if they use it to share information about particular incidents, like the one in the example, it could.